Groove is in their hearts

In the corporate world of modern music, some niche labels still thrive through their passion and commitment. As jazz pioneer ECM reaches its 1,000th release and World Circuit celebrates its 20th anniversary, Mark Hudson meets the men behind three distinctive and successful labels

Mark Hudson

Sunday 13 August 2006 09.19 EDT
First published on Sunday 13 August 2006 09.19 EDT

The monastery of St Gerold perches halfway up the side of an immense valley in the Austrian Alps - a place of white walls and ancient wood built around the tomb of a 10th-century hermit. The trees in the abbey orchard glow in the late afternoon light, the pine-covered slopes beyond hanging in shadow, while immense snow-covered peaks rear out of a faint, glistening mist. I wanted to go to ECM world, to enter the territory embodied by the distinctive sound - a kind of baleful, Nordic super-clarity - and starkly enigmatic covers of the great German record label. And after a five-hour train ride out of Munich and an unnervingly vertiginous car ride, I think I've found exactly the place to do it.

To refer to ECM simply as a record label feels like perverse understatement. Founded in 1969, ostensibly as a jazz label, ECM has come to embody a feel and an approach to the meeting of jazz, classical, contemporary and world music that is difficult to quite define, but - once you've encountered it - instantly recognisable. From Estonian minimalist Arvo Part to Black Power icons the Art Ensemble of Chicago, from the film soundtracks of Jean-Luc Godard to the piano sonatas of JS Bach, the defining, overarching element in all ECM's music is the label itself. Elegant, moody, austere and profoundly European, the ECM vibe comes with an element of seductive difficulty - a sense that the effort of the listener will be both required and rewarded that can be peculiarly compelling, even addictive.

There are people who buy every ECM record, people who only buy ECM records, who spend their lives thinking about ECM - living in ECM world in their heads. ECM is the nearest thing music has to a cult. And its founding guru and presiding genius, who masterminds the cross-genre collaborations that are a feature of its output, who has produced almost all of is 1,000 releases, devising if not actually designing most of the starkly elegant covers, is the enigmatic 63-year-old Manfred Eicher.

Remember when record labels meant something? When Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff's Blue Note defined a whole world of post-bop cool. When Atlantic under Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler provided a guarantee of soul quality. Think of Berry Gordy's Motown, Stiff under Dave Robinson and Tony Wilson at Factory. Yes, it may all seem a long time ago, but corporate mergers and the bureaucratisation of the music business haven't quite put paid to the label as the expression of a singular passion and vision. There are still figures upholding the tradition - like Nick Gold of World Circuit, Tony Engle of Topic - and Manfred Eicher.

St Gerold is one of Eicher's favourite places, where he recorded some of the label's landmark albums, and to which he summons its international distributors each year for a weekend of inspirational seminars (or to put it more vulgarly a sales conference). Yet while it's taken me a day and a half to get here, an interview is by no means guaranteed. Admired in the business for his ability to turn difficult music into significant profit (and the label's bestseller Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert has sold around 4 million copies), Eicher rarely talks to the press. Indeed, he's said to be temperamental in a way you'd expect more from an artist than a record company executive. But then, Eicher is a kind of artist, and his medium is his label.

Born in the Bavarian lake town of Lindau in 1943, Eicher trained as a classical musician, playing double bass with the Berlin Philharmonic, discovering jazz through Miles Davis's Kind of Blue in 1963 and founding ECM in Munich on a very small loan. While he seems never to have had any interest in rock music, he is clearly very much a child of the Sixties. Yet he isn't quite the megalomaniac hippie I expected. With his long grey hair, neatly trimmed moustache and black linen suit he seems part wizard, part headmaster, rather formal in manner, but not unkindly. And he's in constant motion, moving among the groups of distributors and apparatchiks, constantly talking, enthusing, motivating, animating. In ECM world everything begins and ends with him.

'ECM reflects the things that I like. I've developed the label quite intuitively. It's just unfolded like a long journey. I invite artists to join me on this journey, and I join them on theirs. So we choose artists who share a common quality or ... capacity.'

Eicher is exhausted after three weeks on the road, between New York, Munich, York - where he gave a lecture at the university - and Berlin. He didn't sleep the night before, his voice has almost given out after two days of constant talking, and he'll be off to Zurich at first light. But that, he says, is the way it has to be. 'In music, you have to be always in motion. Music is movement, music is time, music is suspense.' He talks in a rapid, even flow - feeling no apparent need to convince or win the listener over. He has created his own world around himself. He need only make statements for the record - the rest of the world can take it or leave it.

While ECM started with American jazz (its first release was the Mal Waldron Trio's Free at Last in 1969), it rapidly became synonymous with an emergent school of northern European jazz, typified by Norway's Jan Garbarek, whose plangent sax tone - 'hymnal' as Eicher describes it - has become one of ECM's signature sounds. In 1984, Eicher started the ECM New Series devoted to composed - rather than improvised - music, from Beethoven to John Cage via difficult-sounding newer figures like Alexander Knaifel, Heiner Goebbels and Erkki-Sven Tuur. And the two strands have interacted fruitfully and extremely lucratively, from Officium, Garbarek's million-selling collaboration with English renaissance vocal group the Hilliard Ensemble, to In Darkness Let Me Dwell, free jazz interpretations of the Elizabethan composer John Dowland that inspired Sting's forthcoming album of lute music.

Yet if ECM began with the aim of bringing classical music's meticulous recording standards to bear on jazz, it could be argued that that isn't appropriate to jazz - that you will lose the rawness, the heat and the funk ... And the second I let that last word out, I realise I've let him off the hook.

A disdainful froideur enters Eicher's voice. 'One must understand that I have never wanted to have any kind of funky project on ECM. So I can't lose the funkiness if I have never aspired to this quality. If I'm doing a lyrical recording of solo piano like Paul Bley's 'Open to Love', why the hell would I want that to be funky? What I wanted to introduce was a discipline, a concentration ... a care! If you look at the rawness and roughness of many classic jazz recordings, it often isn't deliberate. There are many exceptional albums which I love, that have very good ideas, but are very badly recorded. Is this funky - or just sloppy.'

Yet for all his high seriousness - his references to Goethe and his use of words like haptic - probably, indeed, because of these things, Eicher has an extraordinary gift for drawing you into his passions. As he talks about the levels of listening, the near psychic receptivity - 'the secret fluctuations of tones and overtones' - necessary to drawing the best from a performance of improvised music, you feel you are in the presence of someone alive to whole dimensions of music you're not even aware of.

'He can be extremely demanding,' says veteran British saxophonist John Surman who has recorded for ECM since the late Seventies. 'If he's not enthusiastic about what you're doing, he'll tell you straight. I relish that as a challenge, though a lot of people find it difficult. But then, no one is compelled to work for ECM. Manfred has his own vision, and that's something you take on board when you go there.'

ECM doesn't issue contracts. Relations between artist and company are conducted on trust. Eicher embarks on many projects knowing they will lose money, but nothing is ever deleted from the catalogue, no matter how low the sales. Yet ECM remains a success, a commercial prize that many majors have tried to snap up. And in fact, even the uncompromisingly minimal cover art conforms to all the classic rules of corporate identity and brand management. You began to wonder if Eicher, for all his apparent disregard for commercial considerations, isn't some kind of intuitive business genius.

'Probably that kind of instinct is only available to you if you're not thinking about business. I am, first and foremost, a musician, and I make all decisions on financial matters from a musical perspective.'

Eicher, who doesn't own a mobile phone or use a computer, appears unconcerned about the threat from iPods and downloading, probably because he knows that the sort of people interested in ECM's kind of music will want what he calls the 'envelope of the given' that comes with it - the cover, the booklet, and the sense they give of taking part in his personal musical utopia.

'You're looking for an ideal, for musical refinements which can possibly never be realised. But you keep pushing further, because every project broadens your musical spectrum. And if the chemistry in the recording studio is good, it unfolds new ideas, new possibilities and new dreams.'

Eicher refers often to the utopianism and 'magic' of the 1960s, the period when he came of age, and ECM is what an aspect of the era became. The baby boomer generation, to which Eicher belongs, has not in general abandoned the music of its youth, hasn't acceded to more 'mature' forms like classical music and jazz. ECM offers you the opportunity to do precisely that, but without taking on all the establishment cultural baggage of traditional labels like Deutsche Grammophon. If you can't change the world, you can at least allow Eicher to make a tiny aspect of it perfect on your behalf - for the length of a CD.

I could have met Nick Gold of World Circuit just about anywhere on earth. In the crumbling backstreets of old Havana where he recorded the multi-million selling Buena Vista Social Club albums. Or at the Hotel Mande on the banks of the Niger in Mali, setting for a trilogy of exquisite works, including the Grammy-winning In the Heart of the Moon, with kora genius Toumani Diabate and the late great Ali Farka Toure. Instead, our encounter takes place in a small recording studio in a converted church hall, between a gasometer and a multi-storey car park, off one of north London's unlovelier high streets.

A stocky fortysomething, blokily affable, if slightly shy, Gold may be known in the record industry as the-only-person-to-have-made-real-money-out-of-world-music, but he works hard not to give himself any airs and graces.

'I don't see that I've done anything to have airs and graces about,' he says, a touch defensively. 'I didn't create this music. It isn't me playing it. I haven't done anything to make it better than it already is. I'm just trying to capture what's there in the first place and let people hear it.'

All of which might seem just the tiniest bit disingenuous. While Gold has certainly given artists from poor countries access to the very highest production standards, and has been punctilious in giving them the last word on what their music sounds like, he's also done a great deal more.

From modest origins as an offshoot of a live booking agency, World Circuit has evolved a house recording aesthetic that is all about the perfect balance of earthiness and elegance, drawing every last degree of tactility and nuance from the crumbling Cuban ballroom or the dustily languorous African session. With a preponderance of older artists - from Ali Farka Toure to the sublime Cuban crooner Ibrahim Ferrer - that runs refreshingly counter to our youth-obsessed cultural mainstream, the package has proved irresistible to a certain kind of consumer. If you've got, say, three world music CDs, the chances are that at least two of them will be on World Circuit.

I've known Gold for years, and he's an intriguing, if slightly elusive character, whose casual, sometimes gruffly self-effacing manner conceals an obsessive passion for what he does. As we talk, Moroccan trance music comes thundering from the next room - booming bass lute, charged voices and crashing metal castanets. It's one of a number of albums Gold has recorded, but never put out, because, he says, 'I couldn't think of a way of making it more than just a record of something.' This is the key to the World Circuit approach. Gold is going for the Sergeant Pepper effect - the perfect, world-stopping masterpiece - every time. The result is a very small, perfectionist output, to which the contributions of a small group of trusted musicians, including former James Brown saxman Pee Wee Ellis and guitarist Ry Cooder (of whom more later), give a distinctive contemporary feel.

Like many in the world of independent record labels, Gold got into music through vinyl junkiedom. The son of film director Jack Gold, he began collecting jazz and blues records as a child - 'I loved the covers, the look, the whole feel' - expanding his tastes during adolescence to include early Eighties indie rock, but developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of older forms of black music.

Gold, a history graduate, had been working part time in a jazz record shop while waiting for teacher training college to start, before being given a Manpower Services Commission placement - 'like the dole, but with a bit of money' - with Arts Worldwide, a small live agency working with musicians from around the world. While Gold claims he had only vaguely formed aspirations towards working in the music business, he couldn't have found himself in a better position. It was 1986, the term 'world music' hadn't yet been invented, but the scene that would take that name was bursting rapidly into life. Gold, who already had a small interest in African music, soon found himself engrossed.

'There was a huge surge of interest in music that had previously been almost completely ignored. I remember the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town crammed for Shirati Jazz, a band from Kenya that no one had heard of. But it was African and suddenly people were desperate for it.'

When Arts Worldwide decided to record Shirati Jazz for their new World Circuit label, Gold found himself de facto producer despite never having been in a recording studio before.

'Suddenly it was all there,' he says. 'The kind of people I would have thought of working with before, say Lester Young, had already been done. There was nothing left to do. But in African and world music, there were all these incredible musicians, and you could work with them. This huge world of possibilities opened up.'

But it was on meeting Ali Farka Toure, who first recorded for World Circuit in 1989, that Gold's approach to music crystallised. 'You felt you were in the presence of someone and something incredibly powerful. He regarded his music as very valuable and important, and you felt you had to do right by it. You couldn't just allow it to be put in a corner as something obscure and exotic. You had to give it the best treatment you could on every level.'

While Gold eventually bought his employers out, it was only with 1994's Talking Timbuktu, a desert blues guitar summit with Toure and Ry Cooder, that World Circuit to began emerge definitively from the rabble of small labels that emerged during the world music boom.

But it was the Buena Vista Social Club that changed everything for Gold and World Circuit. And it was all a complete fluke. Gold had invited the great Malian guitarist Djelimady Tounkara to Havana for an exploration of Afro-Cuban roots that would doubtless have remained just another worthy, small-selling world music project. But when Tounkara didn't show, the leader of the assembled Cuban musicians, bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, suggested reuniting the long-neglected stars of Cuba's Fifties golden age. Gold invited Cooder to produce, and the result was one of those cultural juggernauts that build slowly, but develop a momentum that is all the more powerful for its total unexpectedness. For a while you couldn't open a paper or magazine without encountering the delightful Ibrahim Ferrer, the roguish ninety-plus Company Segundo or the fabulous octogenarian pianist Ruben Gonzalez.

While Wim Wenders's film was certainly a crucial factor, Buena Vista is an example of how you can make your own luck then push it way beyond the original happy happenstance. Gold had been cultivating the relationships that made Buena Vista possible for years, and he followed it up with a series of stylish solo albums from the various members, some of which also sold millions.

While much of the success of the project has been attributed to Cooder, the guitarist sees it very differently. 'When I got that call from Nick, inviting me down there, I wasn't doing a goddamned thing. Talk about benefitting! Buena Vista became a way of life for me for a while.

'How many stories have you heard about record company people who are despised, feared and hated by their artists? But Nick's musicians all love him to death, because they know he really cares about them and their music.'

Yet while Buena Vista made Gold wealthy, he didn't find sudden super-success easy. First there was a period of megalomania: 'You start to think, I did this - aren't I great? Until you realise it is all entirely down to the artists.' Then chronic indecision set in - to the extent that World Circuit's output almost ground to a standstill: 'I was concerned about whether I'd made the right decisions with people. With rock you can let the lyrics and the band's relationship with the audience carry things. But with our sort of music you have to find a way of making each album new and special, without wrecking what made the music good in the first place. And to be honest, I'm still not entirely sure how to do that.'

Toure's death and that of Gold's other flagship artist, Ibrahim Ferrer - both over the past year - have once again forced a period of reflection. But whichever direction he takes, the sheer strength of the World Circuit brand will practically guarantee the project commercial success.

Yet if Gold's career exactly parallels the development of world music, and his label World Circuit has come to almost define the concept, he himself heartily detests the term.

'It implies that 90 per cent of the world's music is one genre that can be easily packaged for the consumer. There's almost a racist element.'

But surely much of World Circuit's success has lain in going unashamedly for the white middle-class listeners who make up world music's core audience.

'I am middle class, and in a way I'm just making records I would like to buy myself. But there does have to be some sense of the social context the music comes from. It can't just be dinner party music. That's why I'm always very flattered when I'm offered bootlegs of our music in Africa. It shows the music's been accepted - that we haven't managed to quite fuck it up.'

There's an anonymous, steel-grilled shop front, just a short bus hop from World Circuit's studio - a place I've passed innumerable times, but have never seen open - which conceals a labyrinthine complex of offices and store rooms on which the sun never shines. This is the headquarters of Topic Records, a world of cardboard boxes and decaying cork floor-tiles, crammed from floor to ceiling with CDs, old vinyl, record catalogues and other unnamable printed matter, where even the computers have a look of brownish, 1950s drabness. Founded in 1939, as an arm of the Workers' Music Association, Topic can lay claim to being both the world's oldest independent record company and the heart, the soul, the conscience of the British folk movement.

While Topic has long since been privatised, bought up by its managing director Tony Engle, who joined the company as an all purpose factotum in the early Sixties, it remains a bastion of the powerfully entrenched values that make British folk what it is.

Topic has always had a very strong left-wing orientation,' says Engle, an amiable 60-year-old who manages to appear laid-back while radiating energy, enthusiasm and commitment. 'The whole point of the label was to bring culture to the working man. Records were sold on subscription, and to avoid purchase tax, pressings were limited to 99 copies per album. I've found letters saying, "Now we've got £5.12.6d, we can make the next record".'

Yet far from remaining locked into the past, Topic is at the hub of the British folk revival. Key figures like Eliza Carthy and up-and-coming roots balladeer Tim Van Eyken choose to record for the label, partly because they trust Engle's ability to represent their music, but also out of loyalty to what Topic represents.

'For me it's a direct connection to the source material I work from,' says Carthy. 'Topic has a huge archive of older material which I draw on in my own work. I think it's important for younger artists to record for Topic to help keep this music available. It isn't just another commercial label - it's something that deserves protecting.'

This archive material is the music that drew Engle to folk in the first place - what he describes as 'the music of the working people, untouched by Tin Pan Alley'. Not suburbanites trying to sound like farm labourers, but the music of real farm labourers, miners, sailors, gypsies and housewives, as heard on Topic's magnificent 20-volume series The Voice of the People. While it has been consistently ignored by the establishment and music industry, it is part of every British person's birthright, and has provided one of the primary inspirations for the current youthful folk boom.

While Engle claims that any label could have put out The Voice of the People, it is only an outfit like Topic - or ECM or World Circuit - or the handful of like-minded marques also fighting the good fight (and Honest Jon's is a good example of a younger auteur label), that would bother to pull off this kind of quixotic yet vital labour of love. And it wouldn't have been possible without the hundreds of unpaid hours put in by Engle and co-compiler Reg Hall.

Engle says: 'I have at various times recorded, produced, photographed, designed, packed, invoiced, traced the money, lost the money, found the money, built a studio, created a small distribution company, built the racks to put the records in. I don't do it all now, and it isn't the best way to do things. But if there was a project I believed in and there was no other way of doing it, I would definitely do it all again.'

Buena Vista Social Club, Buena Vista Social ClubThe album that launched a global craze. Orchestra Baobab, Specialist In All StylesLatin-flavoured rhythms from Senegal. Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate, In the Heart of the MoonExquisite acoustic duets on guitar and kora.